Songhai Breaks Free of Mali
Gao and the Songhai people of the eastern Niger bend had long chafed under Malian overlordship, having been incorporated as a tributary province at the empire's height. As Mali's central authority weakened through disputed successions and frontier pressures in the early 15th century, the Songhai ceased to acknowledge the mansa's suzerainty. This assertion of sovereignty in the east, contemporaneous with the Tuareg seizure of Timbuktu in the north, was one of the simultaneous peripheral revolts that drove Mali's centrifugal collapse. Under the later ruler Sunni Ali, Songhai would expand to absorb the very heartlands that Mali had once controlled. For the Mali Empire, the Songhai secession was a structural loss of a key province and the emergence of the rival that would eventually replace it as the dominant power of the western Sudan.
- Year: 1430 CE
- Category: Political
